﻿﻿﻿Saved the Union. Fr﻿eed the Slaves. And...﻿﻿﻿

"In a sleek, easy-to-follow format, O'Neill's site captures Lincoln's famous sense of humor without losing sight of the substance--and often the poignancy--of the jokes and stories Lincoln loved to tell." --James Oakes, City University of New York

When you look closely at someone, or at the things they wrote, you sometimes find the unexpected--like Lincoln calling his intended wife "a fair match for Falstaff," or referring to himself as a "fool."Lincoln is famous in the twenty-first century for his dedication to saving the union, for his emancipation proclamation, and for his remarkable joining of these two causes in his address at Gettysburg. But to his contemporaries, he was also well-known for his sense of humor, which he put to many different purposes--from skewering his political opponents to de-escalating the tensions within his cabinet. Of course, he was skewered himself, often in cartoons.

This space is designed for two purposes:

to guide high school history students toward an understanding of how Lincoln was the subject of humor, in cartoons, and how he employed humor, in person and in writing; click on these headings to explore a variety of sources and activities

to provide teacher resources, including a lesson plan and Prezi, that helps teach students to act as historians by engaging in the close reading of primary sources.

"O'Neill...makes seamless use of a variety of digital tools, including Storify and Voice Thread, and shows teachers and students how easy it is to integrate them into the classroom." --Anne Sarah Rubin, University of Maryland, Baltimore"...O'Neill demonstrates that Lincoln laughed with himself and at himself as he was so widely in cartoons and worse forms laughed at. This makes a marvelously different twist in teaching--away from the earnest, somber, melodramatic ways we all teach the Lincoln presidency and the Civil War. In letters and storytelling, so much of it represented here in precise and easy forms, Lincoln won the war over himself." --David W. Blight, Yale University"O'Neill's website provides a storehouse of amusing examples that help us understand the fine line Lincoln walked--between keeping the nation laughing as its 'humorist in chief' and seeming to laugh inappropriately at a nation's ongoing tragedy. Here are cartoons, stories, anecdotes--even a wonderful scene from Spielberg's Lincoln--that fully reveal the man who once said if he did not laugh he would cry." --Harold Holzer, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Created by Jesse O'Neill, as part of "Understanding Lincoln," a course taught by Professor Matthew Pinsker, of Dickinson College. Jesse teaches U.S. History and English in northwest New Jersey. His Master's degree is in American Studies from Lehigh University. Contact: oneilljessem@gmail.com